


It's so cold and lonely without a friend

by kapakoscheisigma



Category: (pre) Lewis, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Inspector Morse (TV), No Fandom
Genre: Gen, fanficing fanfics, post-regeneration confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-28
Updated: 2012-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-30 06:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/328770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kapakoscheisigma/pseuds/kapakoscheisigma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Counsellor wakes up alone and looks for a friend to tell who she is.</p><p>This is inspired by Saltless Light and Blue Autumn Love by asparagusmama.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's so cold and lonely without a friend

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asparagusmama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/gifts).



> asparagusmama - this is for you. I know back in the '90s your Sontaran story didn't feature Lewis, but your two stories with him as a black ops for UNIT just inspired me.

She woke up on something cold, a white sheet covering her face. She couldn’t breathe. Panicked, she pulled it off and sat up. It was dark but she could make out a square of light to her left – a window in a door, hopefully, leading to somewhere with light. And without the smell of disinfectant and decay. Shakily she jumped off the trolley. Two people, no two bodies, were to her left, also on similar black-wheeled trolleys to her own. She had to walk past them to get to the door. She shuddered. They must have thought she was dead, to have left her for dead! Wherever here was. Whoever she was!

The door, mercifully, was not locked. In the bare concrete corridor, lit by dim yellow light, she looked at her hands.

Where they her hands? She didn’t remember them.

She looked down. Brightly striped trousers! Ugh! Was she the kind of person to wear brightly striped trousers? Well, if she had been she certainly didn’t intend to be in the future. The hideous trousers were covered in mud, lichen and something that looked suspiciously like blood. Good. They were ruined!

She needed to find the way out. She dithered, looking first left, then right, pointing left but turning right. She set off at a brisk pace, but as she walked her trousers began to slip down. They also seemed to long for her as well as too loose. After almost tripping over three times and pulling them back up five, swearing, the woman pulled them off and disregarded them. She wondered at her shoes. Her feet at been slipping and sliding in them. Black and orange Nikes.

Nike. Goddess of victory. Not shoes.

Running shoes. Fashionable to wear sports wear as everyday wear. Named after the goddess. Not like when she first arrived. No, no, corsets and bustles were far more restrictive and uncomfortable. But elegant, nonetheless.

What a strange world. Would she never fit in?

What a strange thing to think.

She kicked off her trainers and left them on top of the trousers and wondered down the corridor in her top, knickers and socks.

Hearing voices she panicked and opened the nearest door. It was some kind of changing room. There were toilets, basins, showers and rows and rows of hooks and lockers. Fortunately she could see no urinals. Quickly she opened a stall door and saw a sanitary bin next to the toilet.

Good. She was in a ladies changing room. At least, she assumed so. Unisex, possibly? Did that happen yet? Of course, she assumed at lot. She was also assuming she was female. Quickly she put a hand between her legs. All was as it should be. She span round, catching her reflection in one of the mirrors. She put a hand to her cheek and walked towards the blurry image of the slender, short woman she did not recognize in the least. And she was short sighted. So where were her spectacles?

Confused, feeling a bit panicky now she stared at the stranger in the reflection, taking in the snub nose, narrow lips, pointed chin and hazel eyes. The hair was dark, dark brown. She remembered chestnut curls, for some reason. Masses and masses of long, chestnut curls that had taken a great deal of brushes and caring for, that she had been particularly fond of. But this hair hung limp, straight and lifeless. She looked at the yellow jersey, seeing the five holes ripped in it, seeing more the inordinate among of congealed, dried blood. Revolted, she ripped it from her body. The back of the jersey contained a dark circular black burn: the mark of a projected energy weapon.

Yes. She had been shot. That figured. She remembered the Sontaran and the UNIT troops. Remembered now how she had given the Sontaran the necessary to repair his craft on the condition he stop experimenting on the locals and leave when UNIT had arrived. She had called to them that the alien was leaving in peace, to hold their fire, when...

The ghost memory of pain, or rather the rip of five pains, each like a punch before a burning sensation and blackness. She had a vague memory of being cried over, of shouting at others to leave, but she had been alone. Hadn’t she? Talked to the Sontaran alone. Talked to the UNIT sergeant alone and...

Sergeant.

She had left he sergeant in the trees and bushes overlooking the hollow dip in the woodland where the Sontaran sphere was concealed.

The sergeant?

What?

Her friend.

Sergeant Robert Lewis.

“Yes!” she cried aloud. She hadn’t the faintest idea who she was, what she was even, didn’t know her own name or recognize her reflection or the backs of her hands but he would be able to tell her who she was. He was her friend!

Hurriedly she began to try locker doors. She needed clothes.

 

*

 

Sergeant Lewis ran his hands through his hair, as he looked with despair at the pile of papers in Morse’s spidery handwriting, trying to make headway in pulling them and his notes into something coherent for CSI Strange and the CPS. He looked up. WPC Wendy Padbury was standing at the door.

“Woman at the front desk, sarge. Staff nurse, according to the dress, but no shoes. Seems... distraught. Keeps asking for you. Won’t give a name or explain a thing. Just asks for you.”

“Give us a minute, Wendy. I’ll be right down.” He stood up, grateful for the interruption.

She left. Lewis put the papers in a neat pile and slammed his coffee mug on them to prevent them blowing away before standing and grabbing his jacket. As he left the office he straightened his tie after putting on the jacket.

 

*

 

He didn’t recognize her. She was painfully thin, and tiny, no more that 5’2” in her bare feet, a too big nurse’s dress hanging from her spare frame. Her hair was a mess, short, flat against her scalp, as if someone had just hacked at it, removing greats chunks of hair at random. She looked more like a patient, a mental patient, rather than a nurse. She turned to stare at him with a squinted, shortsighted stare.

“Sergeant Robert Lewis! Robbie! It’s good to see you Sergeant. In fact, it’s so, so good to see a friendly face!” She grabbed his arm. A tingle of some kind of electric energy fizzed through him, along with a possible of recognition, of sorts. Surely it couldn’t be possible? Could it?

Lewis remembered yelling, running down the hill, More calling him back. He remembered the troops, the UNIT troops, opening fire. Eight years previously Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had press-ganged him into some special ops undercover work and Lewis had yelled out his Black Ops UNIT rank to get them to stop, to listen to what the Counsellor was trying to tell them, but it was too late as the soldiers opened fire squat pig-ugly potato faced alien. The counsellor, who had negotiated the release of the three Wheatley teenagers and had got it to agree to leave Earth, was caught in the crossfire.

A day ago. It happened only a day ago. He’d had to come to work, before that, even go home, and force down his shock and grief. Morse had been giving him sympathetic looks all morning before he had disappeared into a meeting with Strange. He had cradled her, wouldn’t let the UNIT people take her. Pleaded with Morse with his eyes for his boss to do something. If UNIT took her they would cut her up, experiment. Morse, bless him, had pulled rank, insisting she was a human Oxford academic and as such would be dealt with properly, with full honours. He would see to necessary D-notices concerning the facts surrounding her death.

Lewis wouldn’t let go off her, holding her, rocking her, pleading with her to just do that thing she’d told him about, to live, to be alive, to regenerate. It took Max and Morse some considerable gentle coxing between them to give up: to accept she was dead, she wasn’t dead, she was going to change, to live...

 

*

 

... “Sergeant,” she had said, with a wide smile. It was a week after he had pulled her from that space ship, her brain connected to its mainframe. She had lost so much weight she’d been as light as a feather, so easy to carry through the flames and smog of burning plastic and alien metal and human blood. Now, as her secretary showed him to her study, she looked her normal self, not a sign of trauma or injury, and her usual, normal curvaceous self, not quite plump, just a rather full, shapely figure. But he was a married man and she an alien so he tended to not look too much. Besides, with those baggy mad trousers or long, floating skirts, she kept her charms hidden in a riot of eccentric colour. That day she wore baggy green check trousers and a cream pullover with pearls and a man’s beige suit jacket over that. Her long chestnut curls were pulled off her face, her earrings fashionably large – this had been 1988.

He’d come in, grinning awkwardly in embarrassment, giving her flowers and chocolates that were also from Morse, although somehow he forgot to ever tell her that. It had seemed somehow inappropriate, even as a get well present. He was married, she alien, gay and with a girlfriend.

They had sat and drunk tea and ate chocolate sponge cake and the awkwardness vanished. They talked of what had happened, of how she had met Sarah-Jane. Of how he had met Val, of his kids, of her students she was especially fond. Then, suddenly, she had taken his hand.

“Robert Lewis. I’m going to trust you. I have, since my arrival here, a little over a century ago, chosen three people in every human generation, people I trust wholeheartedly and of who I am inordinately fond.” She pulled him towards an old, mahogany double-doored oak wardrobe. It was so ornate and over the top he would have guessed at Victorian. The doors swung open. Looking inside made him dizzy. But strangely unsurprised. He had known this woman for less that two weeks, but nothing could surprise him, but...

Oh! The inside. It went on and on. And on. It was huge, infinite possibly.

He knew she was an alien, that she travels in time and well as space, in other dimensions, and therefore that there was, somewhere beyond his grasp, an advanced scientific explanation. However, for Lewis, he decided to think of it as magical, of her as magical. Accept it for what it was as magic and he wouldn’t go mad for the wondering and guessing.

At the console she had put her fingers to his temples, pulling his palms down and what he later understood to be the telepathic circuits. Wordlessly she explained all.

Gallifrey. Rassilon. Regeneration. Pythia’s curse. Loom procreation. Borusa. Her research. Trial. Exile. Loneliness and isolation without end. Trapped on Earth. A restricted TARDIS. Time and Relative Dimension in Space.

She needed people she knew, people she trusted for if – when – it happened. Someone at Lady Julian along with plans and protocols written into the college’s charter; a trusted friend; a trusted person connected to authority. He was her third option, but he liked to think of himself as a trusted friend, although no doubt that role belonged to Miss Smith.

When she broke the telepathic link she was the one who looked sheepish.

“Woah! So this is your TARDIS? And it can go anywhere in time and space?”

“TT Capsules can, as a rule, yes. The conditions of my exile have a lock on mine. A full spatial and a partial temporal one. I can’t leave Earth, and I can only go back up to 3,000 years and 300 forward. So, if you wanted to see a dinosaur, I’m sorry. And I can’t go back and change things, either. First rule of time travel. I can’t save your Dad, or your Mum. Sorry. I’d save them all, all the shipbuilders and miners whose lungs were polluted by their work, but I can’t intervene politically.”

“How could you save them?” he asked, but the idea of warning his Dad of the dangers, of his Mum ignoring the signs of the cancer, had already formulated in his mind. Instead he focused on what else she said, not being able to resist a little teasing. “Oh. Of course not. Because founding a woman’s college wasn’t part of the suffrage movement at all.”

The Counsellor had shrugged. “I had to bloody live back then. A little campaigning for education, the odd bomb lobbed at a shop window...” She shuddered. “The hunger strike was a big mistake. Brought me to the attention of the... oh, never mind. But I could take you anywhere you fancied within those time windows.”

Robbie had thought of Sherlock Holmes and Wilkie Collins he’d read as a teenager: of the Romans which had fascinated him when he was younger boy; of the Regency romance novels of Val he sneaked a peak at... but yes, dinosaurs would have been his first choice, true. But then, she had been in his mind...

 

*

 

Now, standing in the lobby of the police station, she shuddered as she held his arm. “Who am I?” she asked, frightened, gripping him tightly, crackling with artron energy.

“The Counsellor. You are known as the Counsellor. You are the Warden and Bursar of Lady Julian College, which is where I am taking you now. To your TARDIS. Come on pet,” and he gently pulled her fingers of his arm so he could wrap it around her new bony shoulders and guide her to his car.


End file.
